Day: August 4, 2014

There are spiritual, even mystical parts to having a surgery like open heart surgery, I have received all kinds of messages – letters, e-mails, e-cards and I must confess that all have mattered to me, I read them all – you can write me at P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816 – , they remind me that we are all one thing, as the great thinkers say, connected to one another. They also remind me of the great mystery and wonder at having one’s heart stopped and reconnected to my body. It is not something I can yet comprehend, or perhaps will ever be able to comprehend.

But the messages are quite compelling, even mysterious. I was, of course, anesthetized during the surgery, I was on life support machines, all sorts of tubes and lines inserted into my body. Yet my body – my heart, my chest – seems to remember the surgery, I can sometimes  feel it very clearly, I sometimes get flashes of people talking around me, of my body being touched. There is not great pain involved in these messages and memories, but there is sometimes the feeling of my chest being hollow, of it being opened up, vulnerable and exposed to the world.

Once or twice, it has felt as if my heart existed outside of my body, entered into a space of its own, was part of a different life system than mine.

I take a deep breath when this happens, and I freeze. I asked a nurse/friend about it, and she says she is sure the body and the heart do remember, not in words but surely in feelings and triggers. That kind of surgery, she says, is not something the body or the heart would soon forget.

I do believe my body remembers the surgery, I am certain my heart does, once in awhile, in the dark, while I am sitting and resting, I feel my heart beating in a particular kind of way, then stopping in a particular kind of way. Then I feel as if there is a hole in the center of my chest, that I am being prodded, entered. It is not an awful sensation, it is sobering. It is sometimes frightening, sometimes bewildering.

I ask my heart about this feeling, and she whispers very softly to me, a heart does not forget.

I also have this sensation that I am certain comes from the Intensive Care Unit, where I lay for hours after the surgery. Maria and my daughter Emma came to see me in the ICU, they each touched me on the shoulder. The nurse cautioned them both to be light and brief, they said I was almost certainly aware of their presence, and it could be upsetting to my heart, fragile at the time. I sometimes hear their voices, hear them speaking, talking to me, telling me that they are there, comforting one another at the sight of me. I imagine it must have been so much worse to see me than to be me at that time.

Then, I hear them saying goodbye, I tried to reach out to Maria, but I could not move, she could not hear me or understand me. I needed to say goodbye then.

There are so many messages. One from Frank, who was in the hospital with me, “I feel like I am lost in space,” he wrote me, “I wish I could write about it like you do, but I can’t even talk about it, I can’t bear to be around anybody. I watch TV all day and wait to heal. I have nothing to say to anyone. God bless you, keep walking.” The good people at the Palo Alto Humane Society, where I spoke last year sent me a card, wishing me well, congratulating me on being a “kick-ass writer” even a few weeks out of surgery, they are reading the Recovery Journal.  I liked that message.

Betty wrote me that her husband, who had a tougher surgery than me, was caught in an awful depression, she was reading my Recovery Journals to him, and he wanted to hear them, every word. A humbling thing.

There are other messages,  angry animal rights people calling me names for supporting the carriage horses, that is a daily thing these days, I’m afraid, those are not messages of love and healing. And then, in the hospital, I will tell you from the bottom of my healing heart that I heard from the carriage horses, I saw them in my head soon after I woke up in the ICU. They were there in the room with me, some of the drivers too. The drivers are idiosyncratic and wonderful, readers of my blog ride in their carriages all the time, and they all send me back messages of love and support and healing. I do not hear from them except when I am in New York, and then they all know me by sight, call to me by name. There is much love there, it is one of the purest relationships I have known.

But the horses were a presence in my room, they were gentle and giant spirits standing on either side of me as I struggled to wake up, they were silent and steadying, as if to guide me, help me to stand up, to pull me along if I needed them to. I heard them snorting, pawing the ground, they were steady but anxious to get out and pull me along, they kept calling me to get up, get up. And they were in my head, in my heart. The second they took the respirator out of my throat, I gasped to the nurse, “let’s walk,” and we did, I shocked her by walking several times around the floor and in my mind, the horses were standing on either side of me, keeping me from falling. They gave me strength and power, they helped me walk all of those laps.

I can’t say I have usually believed in such things in my life, but open heart surgery, as the name implies, does open you up, death is also dancing around the room and the surgery, he is tiptoeing around the edges, showing himself fleetingly, then vanishing. He gets you focused on the things you ought to be focused on.

Seven months ago, the horses came to me and said they had come to urge me to speak for them and about them, but this visit was different. They just came to show me they were there, and to remind me to remember them and to work to keep them in our world. You were there for us, we are here for you.

The thing about all of these messages – every one – is that they are each healing in their own way. They connect me to the world I nearly left in the past few months, they remind me that what the spiritualists say is true. We are all one, we are all connected to one another.

I knew I would love this photograph the second I took it, Red, Maria and I were walking up a beautiful wooded road in the sprawling cemetery on the edge of town, I have come to love these walks, Maria and I often stop to read the inscriptions on some of the beautiful tombstones and markers, they are so different, so wonderful, they speak so powerfully of life and of death, there are spirits everywhere in the cemetery.

Red has taken up this custom, when Maria and I stoop over the markets, he sits alongside of us, as if he wants to read them as well. This was the tombstone of Ebenezer, who died young and whose marker is in a place all of its own, overlooking the rest of the lower part of the cemetery. So much love and feeling in this scene for me, one of my favorites, I think I will ask George to print it up for me.

This morning Red and I returned to the now famous Outrun Crime Scene in the town cemetery. Over the weekend a member of the Border Collie Police Patrol – a Lone Ranger, I suspect – accused me of cruelty and deceit and breach of trust for sending Red off on outruns where there were no sheep on a beautiful pasture on a hill. The investigating officer got confused and thought this was also happening on our walks in the cemetery and I was upbraided for that as well, although there are sheep outside of the cemetery. Red rounded them up when they busted loose a couple of weeks ago.

I did sent Red out on an outrun with no sheep on the top of a gorgeous hayfield, we will be doing that again tomorrow, or whenever the weather clears, I am fixated on getting a photograph of Red on his joyous run, up to the top of the hill and around, he loves his outruns more than anything. It is a beautiful thing to see.

I learned much from the exchange, mostly that compassion and understanding are easy to embrace, difficult to practice. Dr. Karen Thompson helped me to see that.  I learned that my new heart is sensitive and needs awareness and understanding. I learned too, that I have the most wonderful and trusting relationship with Red, and I am so grateful for it. I am not angry now at the person who sent those messages, I do feel sorry that there are such people in the world, and they seem to have the need to be hurtful to people. The lesson for me is to never to do it and to learn how not to feel it.

I have to be honest, although my accuser insisted the entire world of border collie owners were up in arms against me, I never heard from anyone else on the force – hundreds of people wrote from all over to say nice things to me – and so I also learned to consider my tell-tale heart and look away at smallness and rage. It never makes sense to respond to anger with anger, I have learned this time and time again, I wonder if it will ever be so internalized that it will truly become a part of me.

I so respect the private and individual nature of our relationship with animals, it is, or used to be, a private thing, a sacred thing. I think the Internet has spawned the idea that there are no private things, that we all have the right to wantonly enter the space of one another and tell each other how to live. I never tell anyone else how to get a dog or how to live with them, I can only offer my own perspective. Every person and dog are so different.

Of course, no one can really know from the outside what the true relationship is between a person and a dog. Red and I were already quite close, the open heart surgery gave me yet another lesson, one which teaches us about the power of an animal like a dog to comfort, heal and sustain us.

How can I really say whether Red trust me? But I can surely say how much I trust him and love him. Since I came home from the hospital, he has never left my side (except to do his outruns with or without sheep), he has used his therapy skills on me. He sniffs my heart quite often and looks at me intently, as if running his own check. I love our cemetery walks together, and once we discovered there were sheep there, we both love them all the more.

Red spots them, goes into his crouch – I do sent  him out on amazing outruns through the tombstones – and then I call him off and he happily resumes our walk up the hill. I noticed this morning that this makes me smile, and there have been some days this month when that was an especially precious thing. We can only stand in our truth and follow our own lights, that is, in some ways, the most precious gifts we are given. I am reminded to never surrender that to any other human being.

A friend of mine in the carriage horse trade posted a story online about a farmer who dumped a truckload of horse manure in front of the French National Assembly to protest the policies of the French government. The police arrived and hauled the farmer off before he could drop the entire load, but he made his point and it was a big one.  The manure dump was a major sensation in France, it was covered everywhere and almost universally celebrated and applauded. The farmer touched a deep nerve, it was a classic moment in the rich history of protest.

My friend in the carriage trade was a bit horrified, I think, he said the carriage horse owners and drivers would never do anything that negative, if they ever protested at all. The dropping of manure would simply annoy the public and turn them away from their cause. I think I made him somewhat uncomfortable, my gift to the world.

I said I thought it would be great to take a wagon load of good horse manure – I have great donkey manure – from the carriage horse stables and dump them in front of the offices of PETA or NYClass, the animal rights groups seeking to ban the horses from New York and put hundreds of people out of work for no legal reason. it is after all, where horseshit would be much at home.

The people in the carriage trade are not like the kids from the Occupy Wall Street movement that called for global revolution. They are not barefoot anarchists without a particular cause or purpose. They are just like us, our neighbors, friends and family members. They are generally conservative, immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, they are clannish and generally averse to conflict. They have a just cause and a powerful case to make.

Their caution and reticence is why the animal rights movement had nearly carte blanche to abuse them for years, accusing them of all sorts of things that were not true, or were grossly distorted. A compliant and generally clueless media was happy to relay these many falsehoods  as if there was some truth to them.

Almost everyone in New York – me, too- assumed the horses were being cruelly overworked and mistreated. I had no idea that the horses got five weeks of vacation, worked an average of six hours a day, had heated and air-conditioned stalls and were healthy and lived a good long time – longer than horses in the wild or on rescue farms.

In the past year, the carriage trade has begun to fight back, organizing their own media, standing in their truth, making their own statements and they have turned public opinion around in New York, uniting the fractious city to an almost unprecedented degree. 66 per cent of New Yorkers want the horses to stay, so do all three newspapers, the labor unions and the Chamber Of Commerce. Nobody can remember when there was that kind of unanimity about anything in New York. The mayor, who refuses to meet with the carriage trade people, visit the stables or communicate with them in any way – he is happy to talk to the millionaire animal rights activists seeking to banish them – says he does not care what what the people of New York think, he has his own mandate.

Still, protest and media management are not natural gears for the people in the carriage trade, they prefer to work and raise their families.

The animal rights groups are ingenuous, if not especially fact driven or congenial, they have taken the idea of the protest to a whole new level. They don’t really have much to protest – there is absolutely no evidence that the horses in the carriage trade are being abused – but they demonstrate  continuously, usually weekly, mostly just shouting insults at the carriage drivers and the tourists and kids who want to go for rides and holding up photos of horses who fell down years ago. It is true in our world that if you repeat lies loudly and frequently, people will eventually come to believe them, the Internet is the great friend of the lie in many ways.

Is there a better cause for protest than this issue of the carriage horses for anyone who loves animals and the freedom to choose our own way of life?

Protest is not radical or offensive. America was founded on protest and civil disobedience, the founding fathers believed it is the citizen’s duty to protest and defy arrogant and abusive government. Henry David Thoreau wrote that “the government is best which governs least,” and he went to jail rather than pay taxes to support slavery.

Creative protest has taken many twists and turns in America. The patriots went out to Boston harbor to toss tea overboard because of a governmental authority seeking to take the colonists livelihood and way of life away – much the same issues the carriage trade faces. The first feminists rode bareback through the capitol and disrupted Congress to focus attention on women’s rights. Martin Luther King (and Gandhi before him) understood the power of focused and non-violent and symbolic protest, they accomplished more than massive armies with many guns. King believed it was an honor and a duty to protest injustice, and his notions of creative protest worked. He did more with his marches and protests than politicians and legislators did in centuries.

The horses have been visiting me in the night again, and their message is both vivid and clear.  They are showing me images of scores of them blocking off the entrance to Central Park, standing in beautiful and powerful and silent protest to the indefensible effort to banish them from the city and ban the people who own them,  seize their property and force them into work they do not want – driving vintage electric cars around the park. Banning honest and hard-working people is not the business of government,

I also see children all around the horses – every child on the earth would wish the horses to stay, if anyone would listen to them – standing with them as they seal off the park and shut down the traffic all around them.

It is an unacceptable thing to be banned for no reason other than that a millionaire with an angry obsession has purchased a mayor’s will in back rooms and hotel ballrooms.

In contemporary culture, many Americans think protest is posting an angry message on Facebook. Politics means signing a petition or hitting the “like” button. But creative and brave protest is as honored and patriotic an American idea as Fourth of July parades. We have just gotten out of the habit of  going outside.

I don’t quite agree with my cautious friend from the carriage trade, although I understand his caution. When I began researching and writing about this story, I had an open mind about it, like most people, I expected to find the horses in rough shape, worn out and abused, as I had been hearing.

Instead, what I found was a conspiracy of lies that made me angry and makes me angry still. This controversy is an injustice, it should never have happened, there is nothing to it or behind it.

PETA and NYClass – along with their newly-radicalized lapdogs in the S.P.C.A. U.S. Humane Society – have lied repeatedly, distorted the truth about minor and meaningless events, utterly misrepresented both the real lives of the horses and the ways in which they are cared for. They have exploited the good will of animal lovers everywhere by manipulating dishonest imagery in order to collect  money. They have taken a handful of minor and utterly predictable events and sought to portray these gentle beasts as dangerous and destructive, an awful thing to do to and a libel to these gentle and domesticated and hard-working animals.

They have damaged and corrupted the political process by working in secret to flood the decision-making process with money and circumvent any kind of openness, due process or fairness. They are putting hundreds of horses in thoughtless and unnecessary danger misled the public. These are not the horses that need rescue, these are not the people who abuse animals.

I want to tell my carriage horse friends that creative protest is not an ugly or unseemly thing to do. It is the essence of being American, what we can do when government goes too far, what we ought to do.

I would happily donate some of the good and pungent manure that comes to the farm every day from my three donkeys, and from the sheep as well. There is a lot of it and it is good stuff, you could smell it from the NYClass office right to the stables. I think it is the perfect statement to make to people for whom horseshit is standard practice, a means of communicating, an ethical state of being.  I would be happy to load up a truck and drop it off myself.  Martin Luther King said there are times when civil disobedience is the most heroic thing a citizen can do for his country.

And think of the impact. It would be an overnight sensation on Facebook, and Twitter,  it might well awaken many people to the true horseshit – this utterly pointless assault on people who are doing what people have done for thousands of years – working with horses that they value and care for.

And if they hauled me and my manure off to jail, I would be proud, I would think of Thoreau, sitting in his cell.

“Must the citizen for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men [and women] first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

The flies would have to come too.